Momentum Podcast: 620

The Tale of
Two Businesses

by Alex Charfen

Introduction

The world has shifted, particularly for business owners. There's two paths for entrepreneurs to pursue right now. One path is orienting towards the future and focusing on growth and the other is being stuck in the crisis as it stands right now. In this episode of the Momentum Podcast, Alex is going to tell you the story of two entrepreneurs who are following very different paths as they navigate the challenging market of today. I hope you enjoy.

Episode Description

There is no doubt that the world has shifted.

As entrepreneurs, there are two things we need to do. First, we need to orient towards the future and figure out where are we going. Second, we should completely and totally commit to growing through this transition.

If you are able to orient yourself toward the future and commit to growth, you will get into momentum.

In this episode, I want to tell you about two entrepreneurs, each with their own business in a similar market, who are experiencing two very different realities right now based on how they are responding to the world right now.

Resources Mentioned:

https://charfen.com/community

Full Audio Transcript

Alex Charfen: This is the Momentum Podcast.

Speaker 2: The world has shifted, particularly for business owners. There's two paths for entrepreneurs to pursue right now. One path is orienting towards the future and focusing on growth and the other is being stuck in the crisis as it stands right now. In this episode of the Momentum Podcast, Alex is going to tell you the story of two entrepreneurs who are following very different paths as they navigate the challenging market of today. I hope you enjoy.

Alex Charfen: I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

I had an interesting experience this week with a couple of different business owners that I know, one who's one of our clients and another one who isn't, but that's not why I'm making the comparison. It's two people who are treating what's going on in the world right now entirely differently. So when there's a major transition, a major shift like we're experiencing right now, and this is about the biggest I've ever been through, as entrepreneurs there's two things we need to do. One is orient towards the future, figure out where are we going, what it is we are going to accomplish in this time because that's the most important thing for us to know is where are we going? What is it that we're aiming at?

And then two is completely and totally committing to growing through this crisis, this transition, through everything that's going on. And as entrepreneurs, when we commit to growth and when we commit to the future, when we commit to understanding where we're going, our outcomes, we get into momentum. And even in the middle of the biggest crisis I've ever been in, in the biggest transition I've ever experienced, the world can be in crisis and as entrepreneurs we can be in momentum.

I want to share a story of two different entrepreneurs that demonstrates this so clearly. So the first one is just this incredible human being named Lori Noga. She's one of our clients, one of our members. She has three dental practices, multimillion dollar business, about 30 something employees, just an incredible business owner and practitioner and amazing leader. And I love working with Lori. And where she is, her dental practices have been completely closed down for weeks now, shut down. And she can't even do anything because she's literally mandated to be shut down. And here's, she recently was on one of our member calls and she shared, and I'm paraphrasing, something like this, "I am completely on fire right now. Our schedule is overbooked in three months. We're going to have to add weekends because we're going to be so busy. A lot of clients are coming our way. Is this COVID disaster something that I needed to just get focused and really get going?"

And it was so exciting to hear that because here's what Lori did. As soon as the crisis hit, she started figuring out what process, what system, what structure was she going to use to pivot, to understand what to do next, to understand how to communicate with her clients, to know how to react to what's going on in the world. And she 100% focused on what her outcomes were. And as a result, she has a business that's closed, but it's booking future business so much that she has to add hours right now. And it's in the medical industry, in dental, where a lot of people are wondering how long it's going to take to bring dental back where she's proving that, at least for her clients, because she's created a plan, because she's moving forward, because she's she's oriented towards the future and she's moving forward, she's experiencing incredible success. And her business, my belief is it's going to grow like crazy. Like I said, you have to orient towards growth.

Now there's a second business owner. I'm not going to share who he is, but he's somebody I've known for a while and someone I'm familiar with and see on Facebook a lot. And in the past few weeks I've been watching him make more and more political posts. And he has put more stuff up about being, some conspiracy-type thinking maybe, or maybe just some, a lot, not maybe conspiracy thinking, but a lot of arguments about the virus, a lot of arguments about how it's being treated and what people are doing and obviously very distracted by the virus. And then even went to a rally against the virus, protest rally in his area and live streamed it. And very obviously putting a lot of time into this.

And there was, I made a post and I asked, "Who's doing really well in this market?" And I can't remember how he and I had an exchange, but I asked him, "How are you doing in this market?" And he said, "Sadly, really challenged by it. We opened our clinics and people aren't coming back. And a lot of our team has decided that they want to stay at home. And because they're getting more money with unemployment. And this, our governor has totally overplayed this so nobody's taking it seriously."

Here's what's interesting. When you look at the two areas that they're in, they're almost identical in how they've treated this crisis, but in one, the entrepreneur is focused on the future, focused on growth, focused on contribution, focused on her clients. The best way to make a pivot is to let your clients guide it, let your members guide it. What do they need? So in her case, she pivoted her messaging, she made sure that people felt safe coming back. She made sure that she's communicating how she's going to take care of them in this post COVID-19 era.

And in the other case, I doubt that amount of energy is going into communicating with clients, communicating with team, making people feel safe, putting new protocols in place, because there's a lot of complaints about the virus and a lot of complaints about what's going on. And so here's what I share with my clients. Here's what I share with my daughters. Here's what my wife and I remind each other of is that your focus determines your reality so therefore your reality is yours to create. If you live in a reality where you can help people, if you live in a reality, even in the middle of the biggest crisis in the world, you can still convince people to come back into your business. If you live in a reality where you know this is going to be around for a while so you're dealing with it and you're working through it and you're pivoting and you're communicating how you're working through it, you are going to do very well throughout this entire transition.

But if you're dealing in reality where you are caught up in the politics or caught up in the conspiracy theories, or trying to figure out what's going on, or trying to tell doctors how they need to treat their patients or whatever those things are, you're going to have a hard time throughout this entire crisis, which it looks like it's going to last a while. So the faster that you orient towards the future and figure out what you're going to do, and the faster you commit to growing, the faster you get through this things, because here's what we really need to have happen in this crisis is for entrepreneurs like you and I to rise above the noise, identify the opportunity, grab hold of it, get into momentum and take the rest of the world with us.

That's what will get us through this crisis, what's gotten us through every crisis in history, and what is going to get us through every crisis that comes in the future. And right now, the faster we get into momentum, the faster we solve this thing. So as you go through this, orient towards growth, focus on the future, and you will grow throughout this crisis and make a massive contribution. And if you want to spend more time around other entrepreneurs who feel this way and other entrepreneurs who see this as an opportunity to contribute, to make a massive impact, to make a difference, to be able to take market share, to be able to help people, to be able to make a massive impact and income, then join us in our Facebook group, go to Community by Charfen. This is a community where we are convinced that we can grow. We can predictably grow our business in any market, even this one. I'd love to have you there.

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Who Is Alex Charfen?

Alex Charfen is the CEO of CHARFEN, an entrepreneurial coaching company servicing visionary entrepreneurs and showing them how to grow and scale their businesses through their provens tools, structures and systems.

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